This article represents the first attempt to formulate a hypothetical sequence for German case acquisition by Dutch-speaking learners on the basis of Processability Theory (PT). It will be argued that case forms emerge corresponding to a development from lexical over phrasal to interphrasal morphemes. This development, however, is subject to a…

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age = 4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic…

The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process, but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic, and phonological abilities. The present article reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of…

The purpose of this work is to examine the aspectual differences between the usage of simple present and the progressive forms in Spanish in the context of synchronous narratives (i.e., events that participants narrate at the same time they are watching video clips of the events). To that end, the study examines the distribution of verbal…

The role of morphemic meaning in Chinese word recognition was examined with the masked and unmasked priming paradigms. Target words contained ambiguous morphemes biased toward the dominant or the subordinate meanings. Prime words either contained the same ambiguous morphemes in the subordinate interpretations or were unrelated to the targets. In…

Dual-system models suggest that English past tense morphology involves two processing routes: rule application for regular verbs and memory retrieval for irregular verbs. In second language (L2) processing research, Ullman suggested that both verb types are retrieved from memory, but more recently Clahsen and Felser and Ullman argued that past…

Purpose: The effect of a morphological awareness intervention on the morphological awareness and literacy skills of students from low socioeconomic status homes was investigated. Method: A 9-week intervention designed to increase awareness of affixes and the relations between base words and their inflected and derived forms was conducted with…

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that--in early interlanguages--the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occurring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general…

The study of language production by adults who are learning a second language (L2) has received a good deal of attention especially when it comes to omission of inflectional morphemes within L2 utterances. Several explanations have been proposed for these inflectional errors. One explanation is that the L2 learner simply does not have the L2…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

The language of advertisements aims at precise, clear, pointed, and arresting communication. Like all communicative endeavours, in advertising, getting the message across is of prime importance. However, the use of language in advertising is of a particular character because the advertiser cannot afford to be delinquent or uncritical. The aim of…

Gumuz is a Nilo-Saharan dialect cluster spoken in the river valleys of northwestern Ethiopia and the southeastern part of the Republic of the Sudan. There are approximately 200,000 speakers, the majority of which reside in Ethiopia. This study is a phonological and grammatical analysis of two main dialects/languages: Northern Gumuz and Southern…

This paper examines the linguistic and cultural development of three US university students in a one-month study-abroad program in Mexico, as represented in their bilingual journals. Through narrative analysis, the paper explores students' varied evaluations of their study-abroad experiences, as well as how these evaluations seemed to affect their…

We present a neural network model of learning and processing the English past tense that is based on the notion that experience-dependent cortical development is a core aspect of cognitive development. During learning the model adds and removes units and connections to develop a task-specific final architecture. The model provides an integrated…

This study explores the development of children's knowledge of linguistic and pragmatic aspects of singular and plural in Italian, for definite articles (Experiment 1) and verbs (Experiment 2). Participants aged three to adult were asked to pick objects from two dishes, each with a different number of items on them (one vs. two), following the…